The conclusion to draw from 4 years of post-truth is that the crackpots are occasionally right, people with axes to grind overstate the ‘occasionally’ into ‘almost always’ and people who insist too hard that experts should suffer no loss of trust are likely habitual Noble Liars

Trumpism is like one of those fatal secondary infections. But you can’t let fear of the secondary infection lead you to denial about the primary disease. Straussian noble lying has gotten basically out of hand.

The entire institutional world strikes me as less of a nefarious deep state and more like one of those fragile, insecure comma-phd types who affect high gravitas and secretly hope you don’t actually dig in to evaluate their publication record, but just tip your hat and move on

On the institutional-populist spectrum I’m a mildly off center on populist side from back when that meant believing Wikipedia is marginally better than Encyclopedia Brittanica. I’ve held that position steady for 15 years, despite recent events.

It’s intriguing to see people with far less stake and history in expert institutional environments than me defending them way more strongly than I feel inclined to.

It’s like when poor people rush to defend billionaires.

I’m still kinda enjoying the dividends of my time in the military-industrial-academic complex 10 years after leaving it. It’s like movie residuals. Doors still open for me because of my CV.

But I don’t feel the need to defend the beast I still kinda live off.

But if you’ve never spent time in academia, R&D labs, think tanks etc. and still deify “experts” (many of whom have helped make your life worse), I’m inclined to suspect you’re looking for parental authority rather than intellectual leadership.

Experts are just regular people with a different job than yours. Just like in your job, they span the gamut from conscientious to apathetic, brilliant to incompetent, and honest to criminal. Treat expert institutions the same way you treat car dealerships. Eyes open, no worship.

A good heuristic is to sort 2 kinds of experts: those who deal in real variables (temperature, altitude, number of people) and those who deal in proxy variables (FAA ratings, classes of chemicals, safety levels). The former are vulnerable to incompetence, the latter to corruption

Learn to suspect people of the appropriate kinds of failure. It’s a start. Blanket suspicion and blanket trust are both equally lazy. You can get even more refined. Engineers and biologists don’t fail the same way for eg. It’s more a detective story than inquisition.

Conspiracy theories have a clear tell: they don’t have targeted suspicions. Instead it’s a red string theory implicating everybody. That indiscriminate pattern of suspicion tells me you don’t understand enough to suspect specific people of specific things.

Hercule Poirot used to scold Hastings for indiscriminately suspecting everybody in turn for no rhyme or reason, but also praise his imagination in doing so. He himself would systematically zoom in on narrower, justified suspicions.